


To the Center of the Universe

by notraelet



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe, Drabble, Gen, Star Wars AU, [han solo voice] that's not how the force works, in which i pretend to know more about the EU than i actually do
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-17
Updated: 2016-12-17
Packaged: 2018-09-09 05:19:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8877520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notraelet/pseuds/notraelet
Summary: Star Wars AU.  A decade after the murder of the last force user in the galaxy, Gansey goes on an expedition to find the origin of the force. He definitely wasn't counting on his pilot and mechanic being force sensitive themselves.(Or: an AU in which Ronan is connected to the force physically, Adam is connected to it mentally, and Gansey just thinks that everything really cool)





	

**Author's Note:**

> Dramatic scrolling yellow text: Niall Lynch was the last known Force user in the galaxy, though his affiliation remains a mystery. After his murder, Declan changed his and his brothers' names and hid them in the far corners of the galaxy, where Ronan lived until Gansey swept him up into his fool's errand to find the origin of the Force and somehow bring back the jedi. They pick up Adam on a backwater planet when their ship breaks down and take him along as a mechanic. Shortly afterward, Ronan comes clean about who he is and Adam begins having strange dreams...

As always, Gansey’s excitement was both intellectual and at the same time, rooted with little basis in reality. It got away from him, his hopes and his happiness and his outlandish predictions for the future, and while sometimes Adam thought it was charming, right now it just drives in the fact that none of them have any clue what they’re messing with.

“-and I read that the old jedi masters could control matter. Do you think that you can control _matter_? Like, alter the chemical composition of objects with the Force? What does the Force _feel_ like? I read that it’s like this intense feeling of connectedness. Do you feel connected to everything?”

“Jesus Christ Gansey, calm the fuck down,” Ronan finally interjected from where he was lounging in the corner of their ship. “He just figured it out like, a day ago. Parrish doesn’t have any more of a fucking clue than I do.”

Which is true. When Ronan had first revealed his secret to them- that he was a descendant of the last Force user in the galaxy, that he was connected to it and he could use it in a rudimentary fashion to push objects around- Gansey was ecstatic, convinced that they were on the verge of a breakthrough. In the months since, it had become clear that the _breakthrough_ that Gansey was hoping for just wasn’t going to happen. Ronan’s powers couldn’t- or _wouldn’t_ \- develop any further, and with no idea how to train him, they’d floundered.

And now, after a long string of disappointments, Adam had finally admitted his vaguely prophetic dreams- the visions that he initially thought were insanity- and Gansey is at it again.

“It’s different,” their leader insists, “Adam has dreams. The Force _tells_ him things. It’s not like your connection.”

There’s a short pause, where Adam and Ronan both have to decide if Gansey’s words are rude enough to count as insulting, but ultimately, Ronan snorts and gets up, fingers running along the machinery of the inside of the ship as he heads off toward quarters.

“Whatever. Keep me posted on your progress, prodigy.”

Adam, who has been silent throughout all of this, wants to protest. He’d never called himself a prodigy, never claimed to be anything more than what he was. He found the very idea of him being _special_ , connected to the Force, laughable.

But here they are.

Gansey watches Ronan go, before shaking his head and turning back to Adam.

“Go over the dream again. I want to hear every detail.”

__

The dream isn’t all that exciting, really. Adam finds himself in a swamp that seems to have been abandoned for years. It’s dark, the muck sucking into his shoes as he tries to make his way through it.

After he’s walked for what felt like hours, climbing over vines and through the battered trees, Adam finally locates a building that’s… hard to describe. It looks like what a temple might look like, had the builder of it never seen a temple before. It obviously isn’t a home, obviously isn’t anything that someone could live in. A monument, maybe, a structure without a roof, the walls angled and built with great care at one point, yet long-since abandoned now.

He hears the whispers then, in a language he only barely understands. _Go,_ it says, and he does.

Inside, the structure is an altar, on top of the altar was a cylindrical object that Adam knows from the stories and holograms to be a lightsaber. He reaches out, the whispers intensify and grow louder until he can’t understand them anymore, layered over one another as they are. The metal is warm to the touch, reacting somehow to his presence, reaching out to him.

He tells his friends that this is when he wakes up- fingers on the weapon, feeling a sense of rightness in the world.

This is a lie.

The dream only continues for thirty seconds more, when he hears footsteps behind him, slicked with mud, breathing, a presence that weighs on his mind even in his waking hours.

Adam is no longer in control of his body. He spins and the saber illuminates as he drives it forward, into Gansey’s gut.

The heat from the weapon cauterizes the wound, the crimson color of it casting the world around them in a hellish glow as Gansey reaches for him, choking on the pain, on his blood. His fingers reach up and Adam wants to move, wants to shut the damn thing off, but he can’t.

The saber was warm to the touch, inviting. Gansey’s hand on his face is, by contrast, as cold as ice as the other boy dies.

 _That_ is when he wakes up.

__

It’s difficult to tell if Ronan is pleased or bitter about Adam’s revelation to be somehow connected to the force. He certainly doesn’t have the boyish excitement that Gansey exudes, and seems almost more standoffish than he was before. Adam wants to confront him on it, he wants to say _I didn’t fucking ask for this_ , but he doesn’t. It’s a fight that he doesn’t have the energy for, so he lets Ronan sulk for the next few weeks.

The dreams don’t go away, but they don’t necessarily become recurring either. He doesn’t dream about killing Gansey again, but he gets snippets, visions of other structures, other planets, faces he doesn’t recognize.

Sometimes he dreams about Ronan, but those ones are fleeting. He feels a connection to him, hears the voices whispering again in languages he doesn’t recognize. He dreams about Ronan screaming, about ripples of power bursting from him and tearing apart the building and trees around him. He dreams about Ronan in the brown robes of the jedi, in the black robes of the sith. None of them feel quite as real to him, as _prophetic_ as the one with Gansey, but hell if it doesn’t make it awkward to talk to him sometimes.

What would he say? _I’m having more dreams, but I don’t know if they’re real or not, sometimes I think you could destroy everything, sometimes I think you could heal the entire freaking galaxy, no, I don’t know how, I don’t know what leads to it, I don’t know how to prevent the first and encourage the second, all I have is potential and no guidance._

No guidance. They’re flying blind, and Adam isn’t naive enough to think that the Force bisects perfectly into Light and Dark, but sometimes when he watches Ronan drive his fists into the punching bag they have in the recreation area, he tries to imagine him as a jedi knight of old and the image just doesn’t _fit,_ and he worries that it means that Ronan’s only alternative is darkness.

It leaves him frustrated, sleepless. The concept of night and day doesn’t exist in space, but they usually have sleep cycles and routines that they follow. It’s why he’s surprised when he comes up to the bridge and finds Ronan, lounging idly in the pilot’s chair of the ship.

He feels awkward then, like he’s intruded on something, but Ronan waves him over anyway and he slowly moves to sit in the co-pilot’s seat, uncertain but fully knowing that this is probably the calmest he’ll ever get him. Ronan is more manageable when everyone else is asleep, more at ease and focused when he’s piloting.

So he sits, hands folded in his lap, and stares out into the empty space of the galaxy before him.

“...what does it feel like,” Ronan asks quietly- in a question that isn’t phrased so much like a _question_ as it is a demand for an answer.

Adam, jarred out of his reverie, looks over, curious. “What does what feel like?”

“The Force, dumbass.”

Oh. He looks at Ronan then, brows furrowed a little, and flexes his fingers, remembering suddenly the warmth of the saber in his dream.

“It feels the same to both of us, doesn’t it? I mean, we’re both…” He avoids the j-word. They all do, since Gansey had excitedly called Ronan one over a month ago and Ronan had damn near ripped his head off.

 _I’m not a fucking jedi._ And it’s true, neither of them are- they’re untrained, with no master because none exist in the universe since Niall Lynch was murdered. But where does that leave them?

Ronan shakes his head.

“No, I think it’s different. You seem more… I don’t know, mentally into it.” There’s a pause, and he sighs, explaining further. “You stop, sometimes. Like, everything. You just stare at shit, like you’re hearing something that nobody else is hearing. I don’t get that.”

The way Ronan says it, it almost seems like a defeat. Like Adam is somehow better or more skilled because the Force pushes itself into his mind until he’s almost consumed by it. It’s not quite _jealousy,_ so much as it is- indignity, maybe?

Of course it is. Adam is just a poor farmboy, from a backwater planet who knows nothing about any of this. Ronan is… well, he doesn’t know Ronan’s story, but he knows that he’s the second son of a master, and it must _burn_ , Adam thinks, to realize that someone else has a more present connection to the Force than he does.

That must be it. He can’t even blame Ronan for his frustration, either- he’s sure that he’d feel the same way, if their roles were reversed.

It’s what makes him careful when he speaks, trying to give Ronan an honest answer.

“It feels… consuming. I mean, if the texts are true, then all life in the universe flows through it. Sometimes it feels like all that life needs to speak- like it’s been quiet for too long. It tries to talk, but I don’t understand it, or it all talks at once. I feel like sometimes I’m going to lose myself to it.”

Ronan doesn’t speak right away, and Adam immediately feels a pang of regret, like he’s said too much, but the look on Ronan’s savage brow is… thoughtful, rather than judgemental.

When the silence stretches on for too long, Adam looks away, self-conscious.

“What about you?”

He shrugs, his mouth twisted into a frown. Ronan flexes his fingers and Adam can suddenly _feel_ it in his teeth, like the lowest thrum of a guitar, humming in the air around him. The air grows colder, suddenly. It's harder to draw a breath in, with how heavy the space between them grows, like suddenly he's trying to breathe underwater. He can’t see the power lace itself through Ronan’s hand, but he feels like he could if he tries to focus.

The whispers start again, low enough that Adam can ignore them for now.

“It feels physical. Like grabbing on the reins of an animal.”

Adam nods and draws a leg up to rest the heel of his foot on the chair. It lets him press his chin against his knee and he tries to breathe his way through the voices, the sudden flash that’s more of a _feeling_ than a vision, of the power shackled in Ronan’s hands ripping apart the world around him.

“...what else?”

Ronan lets go of the Force and the voices slowly taper off, fading in intensity until Adam finds himself more focused and present in the conversation.

“It’s- energy. I can channel it sometimes. It’s stronger when I’m angry. Other than that… I don’t know. I have dreams, sometimes.”

“What kind of dreams?” Adam asks a little too quickly, interested immediately.

Ronan chuckles softly and shakes his head, leaning forward to flick a switch and gently lets the ship swing into the orbit of a local planet to conserve power.

“Nothing like yours, that’s for damn sure. Not helpful, either- I’m just in the same place, over and over again.”

Adam wants to ask more about it, but Ronan’s statement seemed final, so he lets it go and wraps an arm around his leg, leaning forward a little to look at the planet below them.

“Are we landing there?”

“No,” Ronan murmurs, taking over the steering, “Just using the gravitational pull.”

Adam nods, rubbing his thumb nervously over his lower lip and tries to ignore the tendrils of life he can feel from the planet below. In truth, nobody _needs_ to pilot right now- they have plenty of fuel and the ship has a well-programmed autopilot that doesn’t need much interference while they’re sleeping, but Ronan likes taking control when he can.

He finds himself watching Ronan, his dark eyes focused on the empty space before them. Adam used to ignore the stars above his head, thinking that he’d never be among them, that trying to think of a world beyond his own was pointless. Now… now, as Ronan guides them through the galaxies and the Force stirs deep in his mind, he has difficulty with the idea that this is _his_ life. He feels like he has to have somehow stolen this from someone else, that somewhere along the line, the powers-that-be made some kind of mistake.

He tries to feel guilty for it, for being undeserving and taking more than what he’s owed, but the feeling doesn’t come. Instead, he looks back to the stars through the thick windows of Gansey’s ship and feels an undeniable sense of being part of something larger than himself, larger than Ronan, larger than anything he’s known.

It’s sobering. It’s exciting. It’s beginning.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this a year ago when I first saw Force Awakens, but it got lost in a bunch of other drafts. After seeing Rogue One, my interest in the AU piqued again, so I found this older fic, spruced it up, a bit, and now present it to you! I don't know if I'll write anything more for it- if I do, it's likely to be more drabbles set along their journey rather than anything following a set story arc, but let me know if you're interested!


End file.
